Description

Perhaps this book should come with a warning to parents: within these pages, children deliberately scare each other, ritually hurt each other, take foolish risks, promote fights, and play ten against one. Yet throughout, they consistently observe their own sense of fair play. Through the 1960s, Iona and Peter Opie did an exhaustive survey of the rough-and-tumble games that children actually play—normally out of sight, as opposed to formal sports or games supervised by parents—between roughly six and twelve years.